MLA Template



Your First and Last NamesProf. Last Name (or Dr. Last Name if the person holds a doctorate)Course Department and Number-Section Number (e.g., UHON 201-002)The date the assignment is due (Day Month Year, no commas)Title:Subtitle (if you need one—if not, delete this line AND omit the colon from the previous line)You can simply delete this paragraph and replace it with your own. Hit enter, then tab, to write each subsequent paragraph. You can scroll down and consult the instructions for formatting various common components of an academic paper, and then delete everything up to the page break before the Works Cited section. A document following MLA guidelines has 1” margins when printed; in order to achieve this you will likely need to set the bottom margin to 0.99”—as I have done here for you—to ensure you do not effectively turn your 1” bottom margin into a 1?” margin. With 12-pt. Times New Roman, double spaced (with equal spacing between all lines, in the header, title, and body of the essay, including between paragraphs), you should get 24 lines per page. When you hold your printed essay up to a window every line should fall at the exact same place on the page. This will not happen if your document is set to add additional space between paragraphs, as is the default in MS-Word. When you write your own essay, this is where your thesis should go, since we are now at the end of the first paragraph.Both in the body of your paper and in your Works Cited list, you should put the titles of shorter works in quotation marks but italicize the titles of longer works. For example, Kurt Vonnegut’s short story “The Foster Portfolio” appears in the collection Welcome to the Monkey House. Horace’s Satire 1.1, “Don’t Go Overboard,” is one poem from a set and should be treated as such. Titles of articles go in quotation marks, but the journals they appear in should be italicized.Per the MLA Handbook, 8th Edition (2016), when “a prose quotation runs no more than four lines and requires no special emphasis,” you should “put it in quotation marks and incorporate it into the text” (75). In most cases you should omit the punctuation at the end of the quotation, give your closequote, a space, the parenthetical citation, and then your own punctuation (usually a period). The exception would be for exclamation points and question marks, which you do keep, close the quote, give your citation, and then your own punctuation, like this!” (24). However, if a quotation of prose “extends to more than four lines when run into the text,” you must “set it off from the text as a block indented half an inch from the left margin” (76). The Handbook stipulates that you must “not indent the first line an extra amount or add quotation marks not present in the original” (76). To accomplish all this, you will need to make a hanging indent (needed also for your bibliography). To create a block quote, you hit enter twice to make two new “paragraphs.” Your block quote will be the first of these “paragraphs,” directly below the text you have already written; the actual paragraph as printed will resume (without being indented) below the block quote. Thus, after you’ve hit enter twice, you should move your cursor to the line below your paragraph, where you want to put your block quote, hit TAB, then CONTROL+T, like this:This is what a block quote should look like under the 2016 rules, just ? inch from your margin, so 1?” from the edge of the page. You do this for quotations longer than four typed lines of prose or longer than three lines of poetry (see below). You should not use quotation marks for your block quote, and the parenthetical citation is slightly different, as well. End the sentence and then give the citation, like this. (9)Then you resume writing your paragraph where you made your line break—and please don’t end a paragraph with a quote!If you are quoting poetry you cite it by line number or the range of line numbers: “Show line breaks in poetry with a space, / A slash, / And another space” (95-97). Whereas block quotes of prose are triggered by four or more lines as printed on your page, four or more lines poetry—regardless of how much or little space they take up on your printed page—must be set as a block quote, following the steps described in the previous paragraph. If you’re quoting poetry in a block quote, you do not need the slash marks between lines, but instead reproduce the line breaks by hitting SHIFT+ENTER at the end of each line of poetry to force a new indented line without forcing a new paragraph. For example, here’s how you would copy out the scene in “Lanval” where the Count of Cornwall persuades the other knights to give Lanval a fair trial:More than one is ready to bringHim in ‘guilty,’ to please the King.Hear the Count of Cornwall speak:‘Never let us be so wrong, so weak!Whoever weeps or laughs, it’s all one—Justice, always, must be done.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .…by my faith in this isle,Lanval should not even be on trial—Except that honor in everythingIs owed by all men to their king.[’] (432-49)For fuller explanations of quotation marks, ellipses, and other specifics of MLA style, you will need to consult your MLA Handbook or a reputable website based on it.To conclude, I will describe the basics of citing your sources in MLA style and preparing your bibliography. For your parenthetical in-text citations, you should give the least amount of information as is necessary. For example, if the author and text are clear from context, you simply give the page or line numbers in your parenthetical citation, like this (25-30). If you are citing more than one source and it is not clear which you are quoting, you give the author’s name, like this (Obenauf 4). For anonymous works, use the title of the text and NOT the name of the editor or translator, like this (Mankind 18). For additional rules, you should consult the MLA Handbook or visit or Purdue’s Online Writing Lab (OWL). For your Works Cited page, I implore never to use a computer program as a substitute for generating your own bibliography. Instead, think of it like a puzzle and enjoy the challenge. I’ve provided a sample Works Cited page at the end of this document, but the basic template goes like this:Author.Title of source. [optional: the original date of publication, followed by a period.]Title of container,Other contributors,Version,Number, [optional: the first date of publication of this version, offset by periods]Publisher,Publication date,Location [e.g., of a website, or a range of pages if a selection from a larger work].You should replace the line breaks with spaces, and then you simply omit any fields that don’t apply. In most cases you will not need to give the physical place of publication for print works. Since MLA appears to give conflicting information in the Handbook, on the website, and in their example papers, this template is a work in progress, last updated 9 September 2020. And don’t forget to delete all of my example text before you print your paper and turn it in!Work Cited (or Works Cited, if you used more than one source)Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. 1845. Edited by Philip Smith, Dover Thrift Editions, 1995.Horace. The Satires and Epistles of Horace: A Modern English Verse Translation, translated by Smith Palmer Bovie, U of Chicago P, 1959.Laursen, John Christian. “Orientation: Clarifying the Conceptual Issues.” Religious Toleration: ‘The Variety of Rites’ from Cyrus to Defoe, edited by John Christian Laursen, St. Martin’s P, 1999, pp. 1-11.Lucian of Samosata. Selected Satires of Lucian, edited and translated by Lionel Casson. 1962. W.W. Norton, 1968.Madison, James. “The Federalist Number Ten.” 1787. A Documentary History of the United States, edited by Richard D. Heffner and Alexander Heffner, Updated and Expanded 10th Edition, Signet Classics, 2018, pp. 39-45.Mankind. ca. 1471. Translated by Richard Obenauf. , 2010-20, richardobenauf.files.2020/08/mankind-translation-updated-for-fall-2020.pdf. Accessed 12 Aug. 2020.Marie de France. “Lanval.” ca. 1170. Translated by Judith P. Shoaf. 1991, 2005. University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, . Accessed 5 January 2011.Montaigne, Michel. “Of the Education of Children.” 1579-80. The Complete Works, edited by Donald M. Frame, introduction by Stuart Hampshire. 1943. Everyman’s Library, a Borzoi Book, Alfred A. Knopf, 2003, pp. 129-60.Petronius. “Dinner With Trimalchio.” The Satyricon and The Apocolocyntosis, translated and edited by J.P. Sullivan. 1965. Revised edition, Penguin Classics, 1986, pp. 51-91.“Sir Orfeo.” ca. 1325. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, translated by J.R.R. Tolkien, Houghton Mifflin, 1975, pp. 123-37.Thomas, Keith. Religion and the Decline of Magic, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971.Walzer, Michael. On Toleration, Yale U P, 1997. ................
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